The Tunnels of Cu Chi (42 page)

The bombs were dropped in sticks that left a mile-long swath of total devastation. The landscape erupted with a string of explosions. Tons of earth—along with trees, buildings, and human bodies—cascaded into the air. A B-52 strike could be seen, heard, and felt for twenty miles: a thunderous symphony of destruction that shook the face of the earth and left it permanently scarred. In Cu Chi and the Iron Triangle there was, by 1969, little vegetation left and few people; only a handful of guerrillas hung on in conditions of extreme privation in the tunnels. For them, the most destructive of the B-52s' bombs were those fused to explode, not in the air on impact, but after they had penetrated several feet into the ground. The explosion from one of these created a local earthquake that collapsed the sturdiest of tunnel walls. The resulting craters, which still deface the landscape, were up to thirty feet deep—huge pits that sliced into the tunnel system, making it unusable and irreparable. “A five-meter hole could be sufficient to destroy a tunnel,” said Major Nguyen Quot. “B-52 bombs made holes twelve meters deep.” Air holes were blocked by debris. When the tunnel system was blocked in several places, air could no longer
circulate and the inmates suffocated. Carpet bombing by B-52s gradually succeeded where the CS gas and demolition charges of the tunnel rats had failed—denying the use of the tunnels to the Viet Cong.

But this military success came too late to affect the outcome of the conflict. The long, indecisive war of attrition, the shock of Tet 1968, and the war's deep unpopularity at home had already undone America's resolve in Vietnam.

The Viet Cong guerrillas were decimated in the unequal battle, but the huge regular army of North Vietnam was in place to carry the war forward. In December 1970 the Lao Dong party central committee in Hanoi formally decided to abandon the insurgency and resort only to large formation warfare. The guerrilla war had effectively been lost. Asian scholar Chalmers Johnson wrote in 1973: “Vo Nguyen Giap himself has admitted a loss of 600,000 men in fighting between 1965 and 1968 … Moreover, by about 1970 at least 80 percent of the day-to-day combat in South Vietnam was being carried on by regular People's Army of Vietnam (NVA) troops … Genuine black-pajama Southern guerrillas … amounted to no more than 20 percent of the Communist fighting force.” The spring invasion of 1972 was by North Vietnamese troops with tanks and artillery; compared with Tet 1968, four years earlier, there was practically no guerrilla activity.

But by 1972, U.S. ground forces had been withdrawn, unit by unit, from Vietnam. President Nixon stepped up military aid to the South Vietnamese to compensate; it became the ARVN's war. By the end of 1970, most of the Tropic Lightning Division had returned to Hawaii and handed Cu Chi base over to the 25th ARVN Division, formerly based at nearby Duc Hoa. The ARVN's 25th had a poor reputation among American officers for avoiding combat at all costs and for doing deals with the Viet Cong. In 1967 more of its soldiers had died in traffic accidents than in combat; one U.S. general said the division had “turned its back on the war.” For a year senior Americans lobbied for the removal of the 25th commander, General Phan Trong Chinh, who was eventually sent on “sick leave” in January 1968. His division was supposedly protecting Saigon's western flank during Tet 1968. In the succeeding years there was little improvement. General Tran Quoc Lich, appointed
to command the 25th by President Thieu, was sacked in 1974 for selling rice to the Viet Cong. The selling of food, military equipment, and deferments from duty made the division combat-ineffective and unable to field a fighting force. By the war's climax in 1975, the 25th had been out of action for a year, its commander in jail on corruption charges.

The cease-fire agreement signed by Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in Paris in January 1973 enabled the United States honorably to disengage from the war but left the Communists in complete control of large parts of South Vietnam. Three hundred thousand North Vietnamese troops were allowed to remain there. Following the Tet offensive, the ARVN had receded to defend the cities and a few outposts, abandoning the countryside. The NVA consolidated its military presence. When fighting began again in 1973—as it shortly did—the Communists made progressive territorial gains. There were periodic battles between the strengthened and rearmed NVA and a demoralized ARVN throughout 1974. The North Vietnamese began their final offensive that December. Moving from the highlands to the coastal plain, and then down to the piedmont, the North Vietnamese troops surrounded Saigon with a rapidity that surprised even themselves. In April 1975 they were poised to take the city.

The devastated Iron Triangle still had a role to play. Just before the final assault on Saigon, Generals Van Tien Dung (in overall command) and Tran Van Tra moved their forward headquarters from the security of long-“liberated” Loc Ninh to what remained of the tunnel base in Ben Cat district, where Mai Chi Tho had planned the Tet offensive on Saigon in 1967. It was, said Van Tien Dung in his account of the collapse of South Vietnam, “an old base of one of our special action units from Saigon, northwest of Ben Cat. From this base our special action forces had over the years organized many attacks into Saigon, causing heavy casualties to the Americans and their valets.” Two days later two other senior North Vietnamese showed up there, unable to stay away from the action. They were COSVN secretary and politburo member Pham Hung, and Le Duc Tho, politburo member, signatory of the 1973 cease-fire agreement, and Mai Chi Tho's brother. When Vietnam's thirty-year war for independence came to its ignominous
end, as the tanks converged on Saigon's presidential palace, the generals and politicians who commanded them received the good news, appropriately, at a former tunnel base in the most fought-over cockpit of the long struggle.

   Hindsight

The Tunnels of Cu Chi have become for the Vietnamese Communists a symbol of their tenacity and endurance during the war against the Americans from 1965 to 1973. “Resistance,” wrote von Clausewitz, the early-nineteenth-century military theorist, “is a form of action aimed at destroying enough of the enemy's power to force him to renounce his intentions.” Such was the achievement of the Viet Cong. Colonel Harry Summers, a contemporary American analyst of his country's Vietnam failure, wrote that the Communists' objective in South Vietnam was “to wear us down”; he went on: “They were able to accomplish this with an economy of force effort—Viet Cong guerrillas supplied and augmented by selected North Vietnamese regular units.” The American military was fought to a stalemate by an enemy who made up in psychology and cunning what he lacked in aircraft and tanks. In order to fight that enemy in his own redoubts, the Americans had to invent a military skill that was so—literally—down-to-earth that its successes were due not to advanced weapons or firepower, but to simple courage in the face of the most ancient and primeval fear, following the quarry into the unknown darkness of his lair.

G. K. Chesterton wrote that “courage is almost a contradiction in terms: it means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.” Few of the tunnel guerrillas survived the war. The Viet Cong can honestly claim the victory, but it was North Vietnam that took the glory, and the power. And when the American tunnel rats came marching home, their stories and courage, too, were ignored, and then swamped by the postwar trauma and recriminations that racked America.

It was the neutral earth itself that was lavishly honored, as the tunnels themselves began to yield to the forces of time and nature, finishing what the B-52s' bombs had begun. The entire district was formally awarded the title “The Iron Land of Cu Chi,” Hanoi's echo of the grudging admiration in the original Western soubriquet for the Iron Triangle.

The former underground headquarters at Phu My Hung are being maintained as a memorial to the tunnel war. The old conference chambers and twisting communication tunnels have been carefully preserved. Today it is a quiet place. There is a caretaker who keeps things tidy. There is a visitors' book containing polite expressions of amazement from Communist delegations. Those who attempt to find out for themselves what it was like to exist in the tunnels, and make a short journey through, soon succumb to claustrophobia or the legions of ants and mosquitoes who have become the new guardians. In the hamlets of Cu Chi district, the remnants of the tunnels are dying of neglect. Entrances decay and holes crumble as the nation turns its attention to new campaigns against new enemies. The young cannot believe Vietnam will ever fight on its own soil again; the old are not so confident.

History, so often the propaganda of the victors, can now record the truth about those tunnels. The survivors on both sides speak with open respect about their former adversaries. As with most wars, hatred fades. What is remembered is how the weak outfaced the strong, and how both discovered new springs of courage and endurance—a lasting inspiration from a painful war.

Tunnels in Vietnam were dug by hand, using hoes as scoops and baskets to take out the earth. Sometimes the Viet Cong could only manage a few feet a day, yet they dug over 200 miles like this. A captured VC document stated “tunnels will turn hamlets into fortresses.”

There were large “conference chambers” at ground level, protected by camouflaged roofs, but when the land was shelled and bombed they became too dangerous to use.

The guy Eyster praised. Captain Nguyen Thanh Linh, commander of the Viet Cong's Cu Chi Battalion and in charge of tunnel defence during Crimp. Linh helped perfect tunnel engineering and lived and fought in the tunnels for five years.

Major Nam Thuan, a veteran Viet Cong tunnel fighter.

He personally destroyed an American task force sent to flush him out from his tunnels. Another senior Communist tunnel veteran—Major Nguyen Quot. Like his comrades he was promoted through the ranks and spent a decade fighting from the Cu Chi tunnels complex. He once lived five months underground without a break.

In the early days of tunnel warfare, VC cells like this one fought hard to acquire precious American weapons. The VC girl guerrilla wears the identifying black and white check scarf. The women were discouraged from hand-to-hand fighting with the GIs.

Instant death faced these Viet Cong tunnel fighters who emerged after American air raids to salvage dud bombs to extract the explosives. Despite the smiles, one mistake blew them to pieces; scores died like this. The water from the kettle is to cool the friction from the saw as it gently breaks open the bomb casing.

Death above but life below. Tranh Thi Hien (
on the right
) was born inside a tunnel in 1967 as war raged on the ground. Her mother Dang Thi Lanh (
left
) was an actress who played to the guerrillas in the tunnels. She sang and danced until a few hours before the birth.

The remarkable Pham Sang, a tunnel entertainer who did below ground for the Viet Cong what Bob Hope was doing just above for the GIs. A party hack, Pham Sang found his courage and some independence of spirit during the tunnel campaign.

Vien Phuong was another major contributor to the cultural life that grew inside the tunnels. His poetry and stories provided a rare account of the appalling difficulties faced by those who lived and fought there. Most of his comrade-writers died during the campaign.

A rare photograph showing a cultural troupe performing in a tunnel at An Phu, Cu Chi. These shows continued despite stringent blackout precautions and lack of oxygen. When the tunnels crumbled, old bomb craters became the stage.